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From the Lawn at Bryant Park

There is a lot less daylight over Bryant Park than there was 30 years ago, and the pall is caused by more than steel and glass. The presence of the new Bank of America Tower at 1 Bryant Park, rising like an icy stalagmite, is a three-dimensional reminder that big banks now dominate New Yorkers’ consciousness.

(The Bank of America, for its part, picked Merrill Lynch off the floor on Sept. 14.)

But the presence of this enormous bank on 42nd Street — 42nd Street! — also underscores the astonishing transformation of Bryant Park and Avenue of the Americas in the three decades since the first of these two pictures was taken, for Paul Goldberger’s “The City Observed: New York,” an architectural guide to Manhattan.

When The New York Times reported the park’s “improvement” in 1978, what it meant was that people entering at lunchtime no longer had to fear for their lives, even though they could just about count on confronting some belligerent drug dealers loitering under the trees.

After an extensive rehabilitation by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, and many seasons of outdoor movies and fashion shows, the park’s reputation was fairly rehabilitated. In 2004, the Durst Organization, a family real estate business long active around Bryant Park, was able to entice the Bank of America, based in North Carolina, to become a major tenant in the area.

To keep pace with this increasingly corporate ambience, the new owners of 1095 Avenue of the Americas, at left, have recently reclad it in a sheer glass facade. The hope, clearly, is to shake off the institutional cast of the building’s years serving the New York Telephone Company. Nynex. No. Bell Atlantic. Sorry, sorry. Verizon. That’s it. Verizon.

The Bryant Park Building, at center, also had a glass blanket thrown over it in the mid-1980s, to modernize it into the home of Home Box Office. The Grace Building, at right, and the Dursts’ pinstriped 1133 Avenue of the Americas, in the center rear of the picture, are almost unchanged.

There is a noticeable difference, however. No. 1133 was a fairly lonely sentry 30 years ago, when the stigma of the Sixth Avenue elevated railroad was still a living memory. It is now one of a line of skyscrapers marching up the avenue. The long shadow cast by the El has finally lifted, 70 years after its demolition.